Two entries remain in my response to Steven Postrel's remarks over at Inverse Square. I think there's no need to go back into Postrel's language, unless you want to, but I still think two important points should receive more attention, everywhere I suppose. The notion of adaptation to climate change is one of them.


Flooding graphic from the San Francisco Chronicle, "Oceans Rising Fast, New Studies Find,"

"There are significant barriers to implementing adaptation. These include both the inability of natural systems to adapt to the rate and magnitude of climate change, as well as technological, financial, cognitive and behavioural, and social and cultural constraints. There are also significant knowledge gaps for adaptation as well as impediments to flows of knowledge and information relevant for adaptation decisions."

"While adaptation is increasingly regarded as an inevitable part of the response to climate change, the evidence in this chapter suggests that climate change adaptation processes and actions face significant limitations, especially in vulnerable nations and communities. In most of the cases, adaptations are being implemented to address climate conditions as part of risk management, resource planning and initiatives linked to sustainable development...

"Recent reviews indicate that a 'wait and see' or reactive approach is often inefficient and could be particularly unsuccessful in addressing irreversible damages, such as species extinction or unrecoverable ecosystem damages, that may result from climate change... Knowledge of climate change causes, impacts and possible solutions does not necessarily lead to adaptation. Well-established evidence from the risk, cognitive and behavioural psychology literatures points to the inadequacy of the 'deficit model' of public understanding of science, which assumes that providing individuals with scientifically sound information will result in information assimilation, increased knowledge, action and support for policies based on this information."

One afternoon, when I was talking to Rind in his office, he mentioned a visit that President Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, had paid to GISS a few years earlier. "He said, 'We're really interested in adaptation to climate change,' " Rind recalled. "Well, what does 'adaptation' mean?" He rummaged through one of his many file cabinets and finally pulled out a paper that he had published in the Journal of Geophysical Research entitled "Potential Evapo—transpiration and the Likelihood of Future Drought." In much the same way that wind velocity is measured using the Beaufort scale, water availability is measured using what's known as the Palmer Drought Severity Index. Different climate models offer very different predictions about future water availability; in the paper, Rind applied the criteria used in the Palmer index to GISS's model and also to a model operated by NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He found that as carbon-dioxide levels rose the world began to experience more and more serious water shortages, starting near the equator and then spreading toward the poles. When he applied the index to the GISS model for doubled CO2, it showed most of the continental United States to be suffering under severe drought conditions. When he applied the index to the G.F.D.L. model, the results were even more dire. Rind created two maps to illustrate these findings. Yellow represented a forty—to—sixty-per-cent chance of summertime drought, ochre a sixty-to-eighty-per-cent chance, and brown an eighty-to-a-hundred-per- cent chance. In the first map, showing the GISS results, the Northeast was yellow, the Midwest was ochre, and the Rocky Mountain states and California were brown. In the second, showing the G.F.D.L. results, brown covered practically the entire country.

"I gave a talk based on these drought indices out in California to water-resource managers," Rind told me. "And they said, 'Well, if that happens, forget it.' There's just no way they could deal with that.”

He went on, "Obviously, if you get drought indices like these, there's no adaptation that's possible. But let's say it's not that severe. What adaptation are we talking about? Adaptation in 2020? Adaptation in 2040? Adaptation in 2060? Because the way the models project this, as global warming gets going, once you've adapted to one decade you're going to have to change everything the next decade.

"We may say that we're more technologically able than earlier societies. But one thing about climate change is it's potentially geopolitically destabilizing. And we're not only more technologically able; we're more technologically able destructively as well. I think it's impossible to predict what will happen. I guess--though I won't be around to see it--I wouldn't he shocked to find out that by 2100 most things were destroyed." He paused. "That's sort of an extreme view.”

In the midst of the Steven Postrel flap, the journal Nature comes out with an intriguing study that tentatively predicts a change in ocean circulation patterns will cool warming trends in the northern hemisphere in the next decade. The study emphasizes the novelty of making such a prediction, and concludes, given a gazillion caveats, that global warming temperature signals could plateau for several years while the ocean's circulatory system undergoes a periodic oscillation.


Blog entries should have pictures even when they have nothing to do with the content, or as in this case, make a visual case that is totally nonsensical to the post.

What's interesting to watch in the blogosphere and media is how poorly public discussion can withstand any level of complexity beyond the zero-sum, binary nature of most national issues: Republican/Democrat, global warming hysteric/denier, tall/short, sea/firmament, etc. Warming and cooling need not be mutually exclusive, as counterintuitive as that sounds. You can have both at the same time, a short term (decadal) cooling signal that masks the anthropogenic warming trend. When the IPCC reviews climate models, it presents the total anthropogenic forcing as net. Notice in this chart from the 2007 IPCC report how aerosols (in blue) reduce the gross radiative forcing:



This is another reason to raise an eyebrow at rhetoric like that which popped up over in the comments section of Tom Levenson's Inverse Square blog (see post below). To talk monolithically about global warming or regional cooling (note, the issue here isn't "global cooling") doesn't provide an adequate picture. It's possible in the next decade the meridional overturning circulation will lower the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere. It's "very likely" to use the IPCC's restrained phrase, that warming will continue after the natural ocean state switches again. Natural climate variability (annual or decadal time scales) shouldn't be confused with climate change, which is happening at the same time, but will also "very likely" go on for thousands of years. The "global cooling" I wrote about yesterday, in the 3rd quarter of the last century, might even have been caused by a similar flip in ocean circulation -- a natural trend toward global cooling masking an "unnatural" warming trend, something I read today (Will add link later, when have materials handy).

Andy Revkin over at Dot-Earth posed a question today about how climate activists will or won't be able to integrate studies like this cooling picture into their own heated rhetoric. Here's my post in his comments section:

“Can Climate Campaigns Withstand a Cooling test?”

Whatever you think about this or that climate campaign, you have to acknowledge the paradox at their core — at the core of any advocacy honestly based on accumulated scientific research. I suppose by definition, campaigns are dogmatic, with focus-group-tested messages and enough Kool Aid to go around. Science on the other hand is this shape-shifting, self-destroying, self-perpetuating bee swarm that eschews dogma (officially, anyway) and drives without prejudice into the unknown (officially, anyway). Staying “on message” must be tough when the swarm must pivot around a new landscape feature.

The hope would be that this interesting paper in Nature leads the more hysterical of the groups both left and right of the meridional overturning circulation (That includes you, Mr. Ebell) to think a little harder about what science is and isn’t, and about what a novel peer-reviewed paper is and isn’t. It’s worth tying this conversation into the groundswell of activities now occurring in the realm of scientific literacy, from the 2005 Rising Above the Gathering Storm report to the end of last year and early this year, when two Hollywood screenwriters signed on pretty much the entire U.S. scientific establishment in support of a debate on science-and-technology issues among the presidential candidates. The latter hasn’t happened, and the initiative has its serious critics, but it’s a sign of how hungry scientists are to let people know what they actually do for a living. [Disclosure: My name is in there someplace among the several hundred thousand blogger-endorsers.]

So, to answer the question, if climate campaigns don’t have enough room to accommodate natural climate variation — and several hundred thousand other issues — into their messaging, a breeze of cooler air, even a virtual one wafting in from an ocean model still in beta-testing, might be the best thing that has happened to this conversation in a while.

Steven Postrel is an assistant professor at the Cox School of Business at Sounthern Methodist University. Things have been hopping over at Tom Levenson's Inverse Square blog. Postrel has left some lengthy comments about the utility and logic of climate change mitigation activities. I'll be addressing these comments in short takes over the next few days.

The thrust of Postrel's comments is that adaptation is the way to deal with climate change. His argument is similar to that of many adaptation advocates who don't appear to have thought through what adaptation actually means (ie, what conditions are you going to adapt to? 2040? 2080? 2100? How do you know what they are? Okay, pick 2100, how do southwestern American cities adapt to possibly not having any water?). More on that later.

In the comments section, and in Tom's response to Postrel, there's been some talk about whether Postrel is engaging in argument, as he contends, or rhetoric, as Tom and Loveable Liberal contend, noting Postrel's use of the phrase "when pigs fly."



There are other reasons that betray Postrel's posts as well-educated (but under-informed) banter, rather than argument. Take this chunk for the moment. Postrel:

"Just one of many issues to consider is the following thought experiment–if there were a provable natural trend toward cooling would anyone be arguing for increased CO2 emissions to balance and stabilize the climate? Answer: When pigs fly. Or if the world were warming up on its own, would anyone propose CO2 emission reductions as a reasonable policy response? Again: Not very likely."

"By the mid-1970s, global cooling was an observable trend. The U.S. National Science Board pointed out that during the last twenty to thirty years, world temperature had fallen, "irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade." The leading culprits in a global cooling were thought to be particulates from industrial sources, increased cirrus clouds due to jet airplane contrails, and the configuration of the Earth's orbital elements according to the astronomical theory of the ice ages."

"Modest advances in cloud seeding suggested to some that weather modification techniques might be extended and applied to the climate... One widely discussed proposal involved damming the Bering Strait. The idea was to isolate the Arctic Ocean from the cold waters of the North Atlantic, pump in warmer water from the Kurishiro current in the North Pacific, and melt some of the glaciers. Most scientists believed a milder Arctic would favor the Soviet Union. Mikhail Budyko, a well-respected Soviet climatologist, proposed melting the ice by dusting it with soot from airplanes. Other Soviet scientists favored the use of underground nuclear explosions to cut canals and reroute the course of rivers, saving water and perhaps ameliorating the climate. The most outrageous proposal was that of Valentin Chernkov, who wanted to use rockets to construct of ring of potassium dust around the Earth similar to the rings of Saturn. Chernkov felt this would result in a "perpetual summer" and lead to agricultural improvements. Such uncontrolled experiments, of course, would have indefinite costs and unpredictable effects, and would be likely to generate unwanted side effects."

What Is Earth Day?

Earth Day, April 22, is the annual celebration of the environment and a time to assess the work still needed to protect the natural gifts of our planet. Earth Day has no central organizing force behind it though several nongovernmental organizations work to keep track of the thousands of local events in schools and parks that mark the day. Earth Day is observed around the world, although nowhere is it a national holiday.

I'm glad they emphasize that "nowhere is it a national holiday" and that it "has no central organizing force." I think those are two of Earth Day's most notable qualities, sort of in the way that Thursdays (for example) have no organizing force and are not national holidays. Thanks, State Department! But it gets better. Here's the picture and caption that run on the State Department's Earth Day introductory blurb page:


"The snow-covered terrain of the earth's surface (NASA photo)"

What a beautiful ice-covered planet we have! And, when you click through on the same page to Climate Change and Clean Energy, you learn two main things:

The Earth’s climate system is a complex, interactive process made up of the atmosphere, land, snow and ice, oceans and living things. Two factors change the atmosphere -- natural phenomena like volcanic eruptions and human-induced increases in greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

That's sort of a stab at honesty. It's a little bit like saying that someone who tragically dies by getting hit by a bus has died (a) because everyone dies eventually, and (b) because he got hit by a bus. The Bush EPA has long acknowledged (in the recesses of its Web site) that manmade gases contribute to global warming. Bush has always had two speeches on the topic, the "uncertainty" speech, and the only slightly less deplorable "voluntary change" speech, which he gives internationally. Here's the picture that runs on the State Department's Climate Change and Clean Energy page.



At least the ice is dripping.

Kirkus Reviews has published the first review on The Carbon Age:

A high-level entry in the single-element history genre from [former] Time magazine technology writer Roston.

Both human life and civilization depend on carbon, the author avers. We may be mostly water, but by dry weight we’re mostly carbon. Carbon cycling through the atmosphere, oceans and land influences life, and life influences carbon cycling. Roston begins with the Big Bang and in Part I, “The Natural,” ranges over topics from the origins of life to body heat. Part II, “The Unnatural,” covers the past 150 years, during which industry and an expanding population have created an industrial carbon cycle.

Primitive organisms appeared soon after the earth cooled four billion years ago. Soon after came photosynthesis, which uses the sun’s energy, water and carbon dioxide to produce complex carbon compounds and oxygen. This eventually generated enough oxygen to influence the carbon cycle, which means it influenced weather. Most atmospheric carbon (i.e., carbon dioxide) is produced by volcanoes and the weathering of rock; it disappears into oceans and deep into the earth. Carbon dioxide from living things exerted only a modest influence on this cycle until the 19th century, when human ingenuity began reversing photosynthesis on a massive scale: converting oxygen and carbon compounds (wood, coal, oil, gas) back into water and carbon dioxide. It’s pouring into the atmosphere faster than oceans, land and shrinking forests can absorb it, and carbon dioxide acts as an insulator, allowing sunlight to heat the earth but preventing heat from radiating back into space. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen and fallen throughout earth’s history, but no natural process can match today’s spectacular outpouring. Readers searching for a systematic report on global warming should read Al Gore or Bill McKibben. Roston devotes several chapters to the subject, but he maintains a focus on carbon itself: its role in the formation of Earth, earthly life, human life and human industry.

Lucid and occasionally disturbing.

The European Journal of Phycology doesn’t have the same ring (or distribution) as the journal Science. But last week, eclipsed by Iglesias-Rodriguez et al, a group of American and Chinese researchers published results from studies in which they tested growth of Ehux under varying conditions of temperature, pCO2, and irradiance, and their influence on each other. They write, “We documented a trend of decreased cellular PIC/POC [the ratio of particulate inorganic to organic carbon] production under greatly increased irradiance in our E. huxleyi strain. If this is the case for most calcifying strains of this ecologically dominant marine coccolithophore, then future mixed layer shallowing could potentially have a large impact on the export of PIC relative to POC into the deep ocean (the marine rain ratio) and on the whole marine carbon cycle.” [p 95]

The heightened irradiance would come from changes in ocean stratification, circulation, cloud cover and sea ice cover, brought about by warming, the influx of freshwater into oceans from melting ice, and changing rainfall patterns. (See Feng et al. “Interactive effects of increased pCO2, temperature and irradiance on the marine coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi (Prymniesiophyceae).” European Journal of Phycology, 43:1, 87-98).

This was pointed out to me by one of the authors of the Science paper, who wrote the other day: “The evidence is not all unanimous for coccos, with some studies showing detrimental effects, others not. For instance, another large study was just published last week, and they found reduced calcification at high CO2, in line with the earlier work and contradictory to our study. And they bubbled with CO2 rather than adding acid, i.e. the ‘correct’ way.”

The journal Science last week published a paper that challenges several years of thinking about how an algal species pivotal to the oceans' health will fare under higher atmospheric, and therefore oceanic, carbon levels.

Many factors make coccolithophores intriguing. If nothing else, they are beautiful. Check out this micrograph of one species, Calcidiscus leptoporus:


They are storied little creatures -- plant flakes on the half-shell, basically. Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog," wrote a memorable essay about their geological and evolutionary significance in 1868, giving credit to calcifying microorganisms for the great chalk chalk deposits of Eurasia, from Britain, south to Morocco, and east to Syria. Carbon cycle scientists in the second half of the 20th century acknowledged their importance to the healthy flow of carbon through the atmosphere and oceans, down to sediment -- a leg of the carbon cycle thought to be under some strain if coccolithophores fail to adjust well to ocean waters rendered more acidic by industrial CO2 pollution. For their size, coccolithophores have disproportionate influence on the global carbon cycle. They are one of three classes of organisms that together make up less than one percent of photosynthetic biomass, but fix carbon into about 45 percent of total biomass. Coccolithophores are shelled algae that take up carbon both for their soft cellular material, and the calcite coccoliths that shield them, spinning it into the ocean carbon cycle, and contributing significantly to the removal of carbon from the atmosphere-ocean system. Their blooms can cover millions of square kilometers of ocean -- they're one of the few organisms that an only be seen with either an electron microscope or a satellite.


A coccolithophore bloom off Newfoundland, satellite image taken July 21, 1999

Head-turning studies in the early 2000's dimmed the future of coccolithophores' prodigious carbon-munching, particularly that of their most abundant species, Emiliana huxleyi. A study published in Nature in 2000 revealed sickly growth patterns in Ehux populations living in waters more acidic than today's:



Emiliana huxleyi, healthy (left); under simulated acidic ocean conditions (right)

Ulf Riebesell et al wrote in 2000 that ocean acidification caused by industrial CO2 pollution would slow down these algae's ability to make their calcite shields. And given the importance of these shields to the oceanic carbon conveyer, a problem for Ehux could be a problem for the entire global carbon cycle.

The paper published last week sheds new hope on Darwin's Bulldog's chalk-makers. The new experiment takes a different approach to simulated ocean conditions under high CO2 scenarios. The Riebesell study in 2000 made the laboratory seawater more acidic by adding hydrochloric acid. The new study actually bubbled CO2 through the water to attain the desired levels of both alkalinity and carbon content.

The results are dramatically different the species studied. Ehux thrives under these new, more accurately simulated conditions. Between 280 parts CO2 per million parts of air to 490 ppm, Ehux calcifies and grows as expected. From 490 ppm to 750 ppm, Ehux dramatically steps up the amount of inorganic carbon (shell) and organic carbon (fruity interior) that it produces. What's more, ocean sediment samples correlate this simulated increase in carbon uptake among Ehux -- further evidence that researchers are on the right track.

This new study is an important piece of the coccolithophore/oceans puzzle -- and also an indicator of how many pieces remain to snap into place, particularly when we don't even really know how many "pieces" there are. One of the authors of the paper wrote me:

The evidence is not all unanimous for coccos, with some studies showing detrimental effects, others not. For instance, another large study was just published last week, and they found reduced calcification at high CO2, in line  with the earlier work and contradictory to our study. And they bubbled with CO2 rather than adding acid, i.e. the 'correct' way.